The real Moorside story

It was built in the 1930s as Homes for Heroes. But today, the Moorside estate in Dewsbury, where schoolgirl Shannon Matthews lived before her disappearance, has achieved a terrible notoriety - and has been compared to Beirut. But what is life there really like? Martin Wainwright meets the locals to find out

It's the council estate that is "like Beirut - only worse", according to a Sun headline this week. It is populated by the real-life cast of TV's Shameless, according to everyone else. Since Karen Matthews, the mother of nine-year-old Shannon Matthews, who went missing for 24 days, was refused bail for her own safety after being charged with perverting the course of justice and neglect, the estate has come to symbolise all that is feckless and disreputable about the working class. And yesterday the place had its own "conflict tourists" - five women from Huddersfield with a toddler cuddled precariously (and illegally) on their Peugeot's back seat. "We're here for a nosey," said the driver, looking optimistically at the sort of everyday redbrick semis you see on the edge of any town in the north of England. "It is real rough, isn't it?"

They had just missed the drowsy, sun-drenched morning's only piece of Shannon Matthews-related action on the Moorside estate in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire. Three police officers paid yet another call on Amanda Hyett - one of Shannon's many aunts, who lives next door to the Matthews' boarded-up house - and rearrested her on suspicion of aiding an offender.

As the Peugeot moved off disappointedly - they hadn't come to see two Asian women mowing a lawn and pensioner Maureen Singleton dead-heading her daffs - its occupants also missed the other Moorside story; what you might call, simply, the real one. Knock on almost any door and you soon get immersed in chat about neighbours, cups of tea - and in Julie Bushby's case, a visit to the back garden to feed chunks of bread to Juicy and Lucy, the pet geese. "Watch Lucy," warns Julie, who chairs the Moorside tenants and residents association, which galvanised the 24-day hunt for Shannon. But too late. The furious bird pens photographer Chris Thomond against the fence, much as Bushby herself cornered the Sun's man at Dewsbury magistrates court and told him where to stick the paper's Beirut theory.

Media portrayal of the estate has most residents coming out with four-letter words, or a shrug. But Bushby says: "I think it's unbelievable. Some of them have been in here and I've let them have a pee in my bathroom while they've been sitting out there for hours. I can tell you, there's some won't be getting another chance to use my pot." She was cheered, though, by one report that dropped the Shameless reference in favour of comparisons with the Dingle family in Yorkshire's own soap, Emmerdale. "Whatever you think about the Dingles, at least they stick together," she said. "That's us."

This is a good place to live, says Bushby. "People want to live on Moorside; there's a waiting list. Kirklees (the local district council) has had to up the number of points you need to have to get a house here. A couple of years since, we were in the points band where you get classed as scum. Now we're two whole bands higher."

It shows in improvements so obvious that their absence from snapshot reports of the 220 houses speaks volumes about cliched media requirements for dysfunctional underclassers to live in squalor. The estate has had almost £4m in regeneration in the past three years and even has a "Home Zone", with a land of bollards shaped like penguins, fancy railings and boulders carved with ammonite fossils. "They were suggested by the kids after a session at Knowles Hill (the primary school at the end of Shannon's road) on local history," says one of two Kirklees community rangers, calling by for tea. "There's a lot of history round here - social history, not the kings and that we did at school. It's interesting to find out how Moorside came to be built."

It is. Not just to explain its odd siting, midway between Dewsbury and the Spen valley towns of Cleckheaton and Heckmondwike, each of which had different types of textile mill with jobs for the first Moorsiders. Many worked in shoddy, the weaving of wool scraps into felt, which made Dewsbury one of the few places in Britain where "shoddy" lost its critical meaning (so it's one little bit of abuse that hasn't upset the estate).

But the history also puts today's problems in context; problems such as high crime rates for burglary, which, in the whole Dewsbury Moor neighbourhood, affected 11.7 households per thousand last year, against 6.8 in the town and 5.4 in England and Wales. The same area - of which Moorside occupies about a tenth - has nearly three-quarters of its properties in the lowest council tax band, none at all in the highest and only one each in the next two down.

It has long been so, even though the estate was built as Homes for Heroes in the 1930s, at a time when Dewsbury aldermen with OBEs seem to have opened a school, library or sewage works every six months. Les Asquith, who is 50 and heads a school cleaning team, remembers getting nerves when he went as a lad to see his auntie, who lived up on the moor. "It had a name for roughness back then," he said. "My mam and dad drilled it into me that I'd to take care." The leader of Dewsbury's Anglican team ministry, the Rev Kevin Partington, has researched further back, to the earliest days of the estate, when an exceptional young curate did what they then called "mission work" among the tenants of the day, who were newly rehoused from town-centre slums.

Does such old stuff matter? Yes, says Partington's enthusiastic new colleague the Rev Kathy Robertson, who has been at Dewsbury Moor only seven weeks but is already familiar as "Kath" on the estate. She is one of many outsiders who were exhilarated by what she calls the "amazing pulling together" of Moorside when the search for Shannon was under way.

"We mustn't let it slip now," says Robertson, and her words are echoed by those of other faiths, especially Dewsbury's many Muslims, who offered free taxis to Shannon leafleters and paid for appeals to be translated into Urdu and Polish. The estate shares one Labour and two Liberal Democrat councillors with the rest of West Dewsbury, and all of them are called Hussein.

The Labour one, Mumtaz Hussein, says that much more is now at stake than robust good neighbourliness. "The way everyone worked together has done wonders for links with institutional bodies, ranging from us in the council to the police," he says. "I have heard so many people saying the police have done a fantastic job, which isn't a view you always get on the estates."

A former resident, 34-year-old Zoe Porter, who caught the bus into Dewsbury to watch the circus surrounding Karen Matthews' court appearance on Wednesday, underlines the importance of that. She lived through the "scum" days that Bushby talked about and was sure from the start that targeted police work was the answer.

"Moorside had a terrible name at the time [four years ago]," she says. "We'd houses burgled, sheds burned, caravans blown up." Caravans blown up? "I remember being right near one when, boooof!, it vanished in a ball of flame."

It was targeted raids, and jail sentences, on a gang of lads that broke what amounted to a local reign of terror; and there are Moorside residents who feel that another, albeit smaller, crackdown would be welcome now. "What we need is an end to the policy called 'Not smacking your kids when they play daft'," says a neighbour beyond the circle of penguins and ammonites (actually disguised anti-joyrider barriers).

On cue, West Yorkshire police have just announced a blitz on antisocial behaviour on Moorside, with teeth. "We're telling tenants they must behave well towards each other," says Inspector Nick Harvey, who is in charge. "And they need to know that if they don't, there is a risk that they could end up losing their homes."

Good luck to him, says Terence Sykes, a 49-year-old meat processor who has lived on Moorside for 26 years and plans to stay at least until he packs in work in 2024. "It's got steadily better here," he says. "They just need to keep some of the lads under control." Then he's off to help a couple of Asian women neighbours start their recalcitrant lawnmower. "We like it here," says one. "Three years now and no trouble - there's a good school for my six-year-old son and other children for my three-year-old daughter to play with."

The tenants' and residents' association is optimistic that the bizarre twists and turns of Shannon's story will not puncture communal feeling, even though police have door-to-doored with anti-vigilante leaflets and the Matthews house has been boarded up with metal screens. "That's not so much about people breaking windows, but because all their stuff's inside," says Bushby - neighbours got a last glimpse of the family's shoes neatly stacked in pairs on the staircase before the door was sealed. "The thing is, the Shannon search certainly got everything up to a real pitch, but community feeling - looking out for each other, neighbourliness, call it what you like - goes back way before all this."

In the three years that she and her teenage daughter have lived on the estate, the association has called to welcome every new tenant, run sessions at a semi-detached house donated by Kirklees council as a community centre and published the Moorside Newsletter every two months. The current issue has one paragraph on Shannon Matthews and a page on community activities, from an Easter egg hunt to an ice-skating trip to Bradford.

Most of them cost, but that's less of a problem than misconceived views of the estate might lead outsiders to believe. Male unemployment on Moorside is almost certainly below 10% (the figures do not break down so locally, but that is the resident's association's estimate). It has been significant that all the male dramatis personae in the Shannon case have been in work: her stepfather, Craig Meehan, as a supermarket fishmonger; neighbour Neil Hyett as a coach driver; and Michael Donovan, the step-uncle charged with kidnapping her after she was found in a bed storage cupboard in his flat, as a computer systems operator.

Phil Stock has an overview of things in his job, as the man who cleans most of the estate's windows, a vantage point that brings out another thing about Moorside. "There's that much greenery," he says. "Loads of open space for the kids, not to mention Julie's ducks. They've definitely got a friendly community here, but it's a nice setting, isn't it. I've seen many worse estates than this."

From his ladder, the retiled red roofs are occasionally interrupted by one with grey slates - a sign that right-to-buy has been exercised. Most of the score or so of private houses have gone to landlords who re-let, but half a dozen are owner-occupied and worth around £100,000.

All the houses were built from very good materials, semi-glazed bricks like iron bars, and deliberately stepped on the hillside back in the 1930s, so that everyone's bedroom window has a view across the Spen valley, which Charlotte Bronte made more widely famous in her novel Shirley. But there is one interesting let-down, which makes Moorside appear grimmer than it really is in film and photographs. Unlike many "posh" areas, where private land is spick and span but the public domain often used for dumping privet hedge cuttings and the like, Moorside's litter is almost all in the houses' gardens. One of the many disappointments for the Huddersfield conflict tourists was that Kirklees' grasscutting teams had just turned all the verges into mini-bowling greens, and the penguins - nearly three years old now - are free from graffiti and damage.

"We share them," jokes Bushby. "I clean my side of the ones nearest me, and the neighbour opposite does her side. But seriously, Kirklees does a good job of sweeping and cleaning round here; and as for the gardens, well, it's up to individuals. A lot of people are busy, and though we're a community group, we don't go poking our noses into other people's private business."

Shangri-La, it isn't; but Julie puts serious aggro down to two households (giving street and numbers) and Maureen Singleton, the daffodil dead-header, has a bit of common sense to pitch in. Self-evidently, her front garden's neat row of red tulips and miniature white plastic fence - although unusual enough to attract anyone's attention - have survived the worst that Shameless and Beirut-plus might throw at them.

"My neighbour said: 'Don't put that fence in, Maureen, it'll be gone in a week.' But how long's it been here now? [She turns to a young man helping her garden]. Two years? Well, there you are. It's not the place, it's the people, and we've one or two I could mention. But I've been here 10 years since I retired as chief cashier at a bingo hall in Halifax, and I can tell you: I wouldn't want to move to anywhere else".